What is a Marketing Persona?

This content is a courtesy of the Kentico Marketing team

What is a marketing persona?

Personas are archetypal characters created to represent the different user types within a targeted demographic, attitude
or behavior set that might use a site, brand or product a similar way. Personas are often combined with market segmentation to represent specific customers.

Why do I need marketing personas?

Personas are a way to consider the goals, desires and limitations of your customers. They are used to guide decisions about a service, product, interaction, feature, and visual design of a website.

What marketing personas are NOT

Marketing personas are not a single user. They are a representation of the goals and behaviors of a hypothesized
group of users. In many cases they are captured in a 1-2 page description that include behavior patterns, goals, skills, attitudes, and a few fictional details the make the persona a realistic character.

Benefits of personas

Consistency across the business for marketing message and lead definition.
Better organizational understanding of your customer’s needs wants and desires.
Understanding where your customers are spending their time will enable better targeting of content and promotion opportunities.
Better quality sales leads and lead nurturing programs for different personas.
More targeted analytics as you can discover which types of personas make better customers.

Example persona questions

What is the segments’ age range?
What is the segment’s educational level?
What is the segment’s social interest?
What is the segment’s job status?
What is the segment’s typical work experience?
What is the segment likely to get their information? (TV, Internet, Facebook, Linked in, Twitter, etc.)?
What three adjectives would the segment use to describe themselves?

Common usages of personas

Identify the features, functionality and content to develop for specific personas.
Communicate to senior executives the expected marketing target.
Guide content development to support the customer goals and answer their common questions.

Qualitative & Quantitative Research Facts

Qualitative market research methods are subjective and designed to talk to a relatively small group of people in the target audience. The purpose of qualitative research is to understand the possible range of buyer attitudes and beliefs, not to measure incidence, project, or forecast quantity.
Quantitative market research methods seek to project results of a survey to the entire marketplace. The goal is to classify features, count them, and construct statistical models in an attempt to explain what is observed. Quantitative data is more efficient, able to test hypotheses, but may miss contextual detail and be a more costly solution.